Facebook faces trials

The publication of a June 2016 memo describing the consequences of Facebook’s growth-at-all-costs triggered an emotional conversation at the company today. An internal post reacting to the memo found employees angry and heartbroken that their teammates were sharing internal company discussions with the media. Many called on the company to step up its war on leakers and hire employees with more “integrity.”

.On Thursday evening, BuzzFeed published a memo from Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a vice president at Facebook who currently leads its hardware efforts. In the memo, Bosworth says that the company’s core function is to connect people, despite consequences that he repeatedly called “ugly.” “That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices,” he wrote. “All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.”

Bosworth distanced himself from the memo, saying in a Twitter post that he hadn’t agreed with those words even when he wrote them. He was trying to galvanize a discussion around the company’s growth strategy, he said. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed that he had not agreed with the sentiments in the post at the time, and that growth should not be a means to an end in itself. “We recognize that connecting people isn’t enough by itself. We also need to work to bring people closer together,” Zuckerberg said.

After publishing the memo, Bosworth deleted his original post. “While I won’t go quite as far as to call it a straw man, that post was definitely designed to provoke a response,” Bosworth wrote in a memo obtained by The Verge. “It served effectively as a call for people across the company to get involved in the debate about how we conduct ourselves amid the ever changing mores of the online community. The post was of no particular consequence in and of itself, it was the comments that were impressive. A conversation over the course of years that was alive and well even going into this week.